The excitement in Symphony Space was palpable. In the audience there were many fans of the composer, Laura Schwendinger, librettist Ginger Strand, Conductor Eiki Isomura the eight singers, and six orchestra members. Before the curtain, the long arm of the pianist in the small orchestra stretched out as the six musicians crouched into a pre-performance selfie. They seemed close and excited by the historic performance to come.
This concert performance of Margaret in Love and War was being hosted by Cutting Edge Concerts. The organization’s founder, Victor Bond, explains, “I have known Laura Schwendinger for many years, so when she approached me with the idea of mounting the premiere of her opera Margaret in Love and War I immediately said yes. Cutting Edge Concerts has produced five operas in past seasons, and producing Laura’s opera seemed a perfect fit for my series: it has all the right elements - a strong woman protagonist, a woman composer with a proven track record, and a woman librettist, plus a fascinating story…”
We quickly come to learn that the little-known story of Margaret Fuller, credited as the world’s first woman war correspondent, is indeed very dramatic and intrinsically opera-worthy. She lived in Italy at the time when it was struggling to become a free Republic, and reported on the war as it was unfolding. Not only did she have this professional credit to her name, but she tragically died in a shipwreck as she was sailing to America with her Italian husband and their son. She had met her husband, a fighter for a new republic in Italy, during the course of her work. Margaret Fuller’s story has both the romance of revolution mixed with her personal romance, and her tragic ending at sea.
Composer Laura Schwendinger shares that most of her work on this opera was done at a time of her late mother’s illness and passing— infusing her work with a sense of love and loss that is quite apparent, as is the feeling of the sea, from beginning to end.
Here, Picture This Post (PTP) talks more with composer Laura Schwendinger (LS) about her latest opera.
(PTP) How did you first encounter the story of Margaret Fuller and come to think of it as opera-worthy?
(LS) My librettist Ginger Strand was a great admirer of Margaret Fuller's work and legacy. I had heard of Margaret Fuller’s great work Woman of the Nineteenth Century**, and when I was a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, I came across her name in other research I had done at the The Schlesinger Library.
When Ginger suggested her as a subject for a new opera I was thrilled at the idea, as Margaret Fuller had a very dramatic life.
(Editor’s Note: Woman of the Nineteenth Century is considered an early feminist text.)
How did your collaboration with Ginger Strand on this this opera evolve?
Ginger and I met at a MacDowell residency many years ago. Since then we have had a chance to get to know each other well, and have now written three operas together.
We collaborate well and have similar interests. Our first opera Artemisia about the great painter Artemisia Gentileschi won the 2023 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the largest such award given in the US to opera creators.
Did you and Strand mutually decide to begin the opera with the tragic shipwreck and precis of Fuller’s story?
I had that idea, and Ginger was open to it. I love Benjamin Britten's sea operas. I grew up on the coast in California where the sea is a constant. My father was a Maritime historian, so sea lore has been long been important to me.
I woke up one night and heard that opening in my head. It haunted me for days, and that is when I suggested that image and idea to Ginger, who suffused it with meaning, longing and the historical significance of Henry David Thoreau who is sent by Emerson to find Margaret Fuller on the rocks where her ship foundered.
How is working on this opera distinct from your prior opera projects?
All of our operas have featured the stories of actual woman whose lives have been overshadowed by rewritten histories, and whose work was invaluable and of extreme importance to our understanding of their times.
Margaret in Love and War is perhaps, in the words of our excellent conductor Eiki Isomura, perhaps more dreamy in conception than our other two operas. The cyclical nature of the form, starting with the ship wreck and moving back to the events of Margaret's life when in Rome, was novel for me, and a challenge. This structure allowed a certain amount of melodic and musical recollection within the work. The central focus of the opera, set in Rome in the 1840s, also gave me the opportunity to try and channel the lyricism of Puccini and the drama of Verdi, to infuse all with the sense of the Italian Risorgimento**.
(Editor’s Note: Risorgimento refers to the 19th Century movement to unify Italy into a single nation state.)
This opera really became a possibility after I received a large grant from the University of Wisconsin Madison, where I run a composition program. The $30,000 Creative Arts Award supported the production. Victoria Bond was excited to present the new opera on her wonderful Cutting Edge Concerts New Music Festival at Symphony Space. They have presented other operas in past years so it is part of their mission to tackle large works.
How did you choose instrumentation or other compositional tools to differentiate the varying emotional milestones in the story?
The instrumentation allowed for a multiplicity of instrumental colors and combinations with a small ensemble. The love duet Sposami (Marry me) is set with rich strings, and soaring intertwined lines in the voice. Sweet and espressivo lines in the flute and cello double the tender lines in which Margaret and Giovanni sing about having to leave their child. While the revolution is carried in drums throughout as a backdrop to the couple's story. The Greek Chorus brings us back repeatedly to the martial quality of the fight, and the changes in power that took place.
